Halfway through his show at the Riviera, Billy Bragg, as is his wont, digressed into a short monologue before his new song “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.” This song is the standout track on Bragg’s new record, Workers Playtime; it’s a luminous, transcontinental fantasy that begins in Cuba, rockets out to a nuclear test station in Russia, and ricochets back to Bragg himself, closing down another show and being quizzed by a fanzine writer about “mixing pop and politics.” Bragg recognizes the pointedness of the question but is wearily unrepentant. “You can be active with the activists / Or sleep in with the sleepers / While you’re waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.”
“And Mao said, ‘It’s too early to tell.’”
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Along with artists like the Smiths, Lloyd Cole, Paul Weller, the Communards, and Madness, Bragg has been active in England’s Red Wedge, “for but not of” the Labour party, registering voters and hoping to blunt the tide of Thatcherism. So, he explained, wrapping up his historical monologue, “People come up to me and ask, ‘Billy, you were active with the Red Wedge and doing all this activity during the last campaign, but Margaret Thatcher just won a resounding victory. Did the Red Wedge have any effect at all?’ And I say to them,” said Billy Bragg, “‘It’s too early to tell.’”
Bragg is a slight Londoner, 30 years old, who in his four U.S. studio albums has established himself as the best songwriter England has produced since Costello. Unlike Fogerty–unlike, for that matter, Costello–Bragg’s relationships with the opposite sex have a healthy normality to them. Combined with his political interests, his preoccupation with sex, romance, and marriage (in that order) gives his songs a full-bodied texture; though he sometimes writes songs with a strictly political content, these are rare. Most often his political songs and his love songs are shot through with concern, each for the other.
Talking to the Taxman just gets better from there. “Ideology” is a scathing rewrite of Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom”–Bragg’s line is “the sound of ideologies clashing.” “Levi Stubbs’ Tears” seems outlandish at first hearing; it’s an abject story of a lonely woman who takes what solace she can from Four Tops records, and on the surface it appears to be an assertion of Motown music’s healing properties. But Bragg builds up a remarkable tension in the song, and in the end I’m not sure that his point isn’t that there are certain limits to what rock ‘n’ roll can do–a scary observation for both him and us.
There are a couple of misfit songs on Playtime, and I miss in it the utterly confident loquacity and effortless charm of Taxman. But Playtime is a mature, full-bodied work, bursting with melody and invention, by our leading realist. And who else would dare to subtitle his record “Capitalism Is Killing Music”?
Bragg joined Shocked for her last song, a Bragg-Shocked composition called “Waiting for a New Deal Now,” done country style, with Bragg, dressed in a suit coat for once, hunkered over an acoustic guitar and singing harmony. It was a nice moment. Bragg returned ten minutes later to start his own show and played for more than 90 minutes, performing more than 20 songs, a lot for him because he tends to devote much of his show to political lectures and comedy routines. On this night, he gave the Chinese history lesson described above; some extended comment on the presidential debates (“Quayle will be a bladder away from the presidency”); a serious offer to nonvoting radical types (“You go to the ballot box with me this year and I’ll come out in the streets with you when the time comes”); and a plea, before “Help Save the Youth of America,” for Americans to remember the rest of the world: “You may wonder what someone from a small constitutional monarchy off the coast of Europe cares about what you do. Well, you’re electing a president for us, too.” Bragg also displayed a “Lick Bush” sticker on the back of his guitar, and admitted that only recently someone explained to him the message’s double entendre. This launched him into a long discussion of cunnilingus and a joke about running for office on a platform of “incredibly good head.”
